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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   32994 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of February 13, 2023

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IQ is generally not in the Western mainstream. I've seen people express genuine shock at the idea that IQ is even heritable.

I strongly suspect that this is a "blue tribe midwit" phenomenon. I would also bet that most of those people think IQ is a fake statistic made up by racists in general, and that most of them would cite the "regatta" example as proof. That idea is much rarer among the people who don't even pretend they read the NYT. "Parents pass down traits like brawn and brains" is the sort of folk wisdom that everyone has... except for the people who've had that scooped out and replaced with something else.

In a freshman class in college many years ago we were basically fed anti-IQ propaganda. Including impuning people as racists. Good educated middling progressives have been inoculated against honestly considering the facts of heritability. That well has been thoroughly poisoned.

The American working class mostly does not think IQ is particularly closely correlated with g, and is fairly likely to deny the influence of IQ on success in education.

The "American working class" has never even heard of Spearman's g.

That is completely antithetical to my experience. They think IQ is the measure of how smart someone is, so they think it obviously factors into success in education... even if that's not necessarily the be-all-end-all of general life success (book smarts versus practical smarts). They have never heard of g, and have also never heard of progressive cope lines around the topic.

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